📚 What story are you telling?

Strategies for more compelling sales narratives—backed by data

Photo by Nong on Unsplash

Successful sales and marketing strategies evolve with your audience’s changing needs, interests, and pain points.

This week, we’re talking about the most impactful adjustments you could start implementing now.

Today’s agenda:

☕ Infusing stories into sales

📊 The immense value of customer data

💻 Should you be on Reddit?

💼 Briefly: One-pagers and event engagement 

⏱️ Up & coming: Budgeting in the age of AI

📚 What makes a compelling sales story?

Sales requires persuasion, and persuasion involves good storytelling, writes consumer anthropologist Gina Fong and storytelling coach Esther Choy for Harvard Business Review.

According to the authors, a “compelling story” involves:

• Listening

• Making an emotional connection

• Thinking from your customer’s point of view

🗣️ The key to more effective sales stories

Compelling stories that convince your prospects you can meet their needs are built from the following:

1. Identifying their obstacles: What is the barrier they need to overcome? And how does your product/service help them overcome it?

2. Creating a shared sense of understanding: Dive into the customer’s point of view to truly understand (on an emotional level) why they should care about what you have to offer

3. Telling a different story: Shift your story/sales pitch to meet the unique needs and perspective of the customer

💡 You may think you know what sets your product/service apart, but don’t get so stuck on this view that you forget to address the real concerns of those standing in front of you.

Shifting your story is merely reframing it to meet your customer’s needs—and you can only tap into this by listening to and understanding what these are.

💪 Data = better marketing

A recent survey of customer engagement decision-makers from around the world found that leveraging customer behavioral signal data in their marketing leads to:

• Improved performance marketing (56%)

• Increased investment in content marketing (52%)

• Improved segmentation (48%)

• Improved brand strategy and identity (44%)

⭐ In turn, these improvements lead to higher customer satisfaction, revenue, and team productivity.

💡 Customer behavioral signal data is information collected on the actions and behaviors of customers as they interact with a brand or its products and services. 

This data includes:

• Browsing history

• Purchase behavior

• Engagement metrics

• Search queries

Are you using this data to fuel your marketing strategies?

💬 Is Reddit worth your time?

Reddit is among the top 10 social media websites in the world, but it’s not well known as a marketing tool.

However, in 2024 social media user preferences are shifting to desire deeper connection, engagement, and usefulness, and Reddit ticks all of these boxes.

Additionally, Reddit forums are so influential that they frequently appear in Google search results—and OpenAI and Google recently made deals with Reddit for future AI use.

In this Google screenshot, the third suggested search topic includes “reddit.”

What can businesses do with Reddit?

Search Engine Journal compiled a few examples of how brands have successfully used Reddit in the past, including:

• Noosa Yoghurt’s back-to-school campaign

• Sony Pictures Germany’s campaign to promote a new Spider-Man movie

However, your business could start by participating in subreddits related to your industry or niche, answering questions, providing valuable insights, or gathering insights about customers.

💡 Marketing on Reddit is not quick or easy, but businesses that have a strong interest in forming deeper connections with their audience have the chance to reap great rewards.

Briefly

📃 Do you have a business one-pager? Here are tips, examples, and a free template for making one 

🤖 Microsoft’s chief communications officer says AI needs to be infused with emotional intelligence, and will help produce “the next 1,000 Einsteins”

☀️ BlueSky, X’s (formerly Twitter’s) biggest competitor, is now allowing direct messages—and working on DMs that support images and videos

💻 Microsoft announces its AI assistant, Copilot, can now “access virtually what you have seen or done on your PC in a way that feels like having photographic memory”

🏃 See examples of brands that turned in-person events into online engagement

🐦 X plans to soon remove public likes from a user’s profile page, which means users will not be able to see what another user liked

Up & Coming

Technology has taken over marketing—here’s what you need to know about how it’s impacting/could impact your budget.